‘Weathering,’ by Lucy Wood

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By Andrew Sean Greer

Feb. 12, 2016

“She made marmalade cake and soup with carrots and ginger; trying to replace the smell of damp with cooking smells. But still: damp shoes, damp clothes, the dank smell of river. The leak in the hall splitting the ceiling like the crust of a loaf.” The snowed-in feeling of Lucy Wood’s captivating debut novel, “Weathering,” comes from such descriptions of the house Ada has inherited upon her mother’s death, to which she has brought her young daughter, Pepper. This dampness so pervades the book that it almost swells the pages, and the imagery typifies Wood’s wonderful and energetic style, all the way down to the smallest detail: “She found a silty smudge, like a handprint, on the outside of the kitchen window and a small pile of stones on the front steps.” Lest you settle down too comfortably in this winter cabin of a novel: The handprint is that of her dead mother, Pearl.

“All that time wasted being scared of driving,” the ghost of Pearl thinks to herself when she rises from the river, “of poisonous fumes from the fire, and in the end it was stairs.” Or is she a ghost? This Pearl is as crabby, willful and stubborn as her living counterpart; she doesn’t haunt her old house or its inhabitants but merely appears. To Pepper, she’s an old woman by the river. To Ada, she’s the memory of her mother. But mostly she’s the spirit of something unsettled, pried loose from a muddied river bottom, and her journey echoes the novel’s movement from frozen anxiety to the spring thaw of resignation and acceptance.

Like Colm Toibin’s “Brooklyn” and “Nora Webster,” Wood’s novel has no burning secrets or sudden deaths; instead, it deploys a sequence of small gestures (a discovered button, a deer made into a pie, a man’s breath on Ada’s neck, the swelling of the river) with such sleight-of-hand that the reader never guesses whether joy, injury or humiliation is ahead — much like life. These scenes are pinned to the ­pages by Wood’s extraordinary writing, the finest language and imagery I’ve come across in a very long time. Precise, unindulgent, fresh and honest, every page is a celebration: “There was the holly bush, revealed suddenly like a skeleton”; “the first daffodils coming up like lamps”; “a glimmer of gray, which spread like the sky was being scrubbed.”

Take this scene, when Ada first goes in search of firewood: “Out into the ­weather. The roar of the river. Cobwebs slung like hammocks in the hedge. The smell of bonfire and wet soil. Long grass soaked her shoes. Nothing in the vegetable plot except mushy weeds bowing to the earth, something sodden and green that may once have been a potato. In the shed, swallows’ nests festooned the beams. Old paint pots, their lids splashed with the blue of her bedroom, the yellow of the bathroom. The ax and saw were leaning against the wall but there was no wood, not even a twig for kindling.”

Or this description of Luke, Pearl’s only friend: “His pale blue eyes were fixed on the road. Waxy hair pushed behind his ears. His suit jacket sleeves had been mended with small stitches and his hands were ridged with turquoise veins. A gold ring on his thumb, the inky edge of a tattoo creeping up the top of his neck. He had a dented nose from when a cow had kicked him in the face. He’d just got straight back up again, pushed his nose into place and said something about how come the grass didn’t smell any more? After that, he couldn’t smell or taste anything — not bread, not garlic, not anything.”

Paragraphs like these feel full of marvelous clues. “The house stank of wet paint and Pepper could taste it in the back of her throat,” Wood writes. “She went upstairs and into the room her mother was sleeping in. The wind shook the window. ‘I got born in a storm,’ she said.”

There’s a gap between “The wind shook the window” and “I got born in a storm.” What’s missing? It’s the link of Pepper’s thoughts, the kind of commentary and chatter we find in contemporary life. In their place Wood gives us silence. She has her readers do a little work, and by asking us to fill in these silences ourselves, she rewards us with a feeling of connection to the novel, whose inner life we participate in decoding. By the end of the book, when we hear something as simple as a heron’s cry, we understand it isn’t only a canny observation of bird calls but an echo of Pearl’s husband, who abandoned her and Ada long ago: “The heron was away, calling out frank, frank.” The lack of capitalization underlines Wood’s ability to strike the perfect note.

Perhaps I’m expressing one writer’s appreciation of another, a salute for unaffectedly deploying words like “smeeching,” “dimpsy” and “chuntering,” for reveling in the influence of writers like Toibin and Marilynne Robinson. After all, nothing much happens in “Weathering.” There are no deathbed scenes or declarations of love, no diamond heists. (And I’m a fan of all of these.)

But for the sort of reader who can wait for a fire to get roaring, who can live with a cat who refuses to sit in your lap — in short, a reader who enjoys a house in winter — there are the rewards of beauty and humanity in “Weathering.” So many of the characters, worn down by a life of disappointments, feel as Luke does when, after fruitlessly digging in his garden for ancient coins, he tells Pepper: “In the end you have to let it go.” But one senses that Wood feels differently, as does Pepper. She looks at the old man as he stares despondently into his drink. “Why?” she asks him, an innocent and startling demand. “Why do you?” Why indeed?